[H]ard|OCP reviews Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO video card
On October 5, 2005, ATI announced their Radeon X1000 family of video cards. With this new series ATI introduced their memory ring bus architecture to help alleviate bandwidth issues. This is a feature that we would expect to have a greater impact on midrange video cards where bandwidth is at a premium. For more information regarding the technology and the rest of the X1000 family specifications we have a preview here.
Sapphiretech offers a wide array of hardware ranging from graphics cards to mainboards to MP3 players. Sapphire is a an important add-in-board manufacturer for ATI. They produce boards for ATI as well as OEMs. Sapphire's Radeon X1600 PRO can be found here with full specifications.
The Radeon X1600 PRO GPU has 157 million transistors. You will find shader model 3.0 support with DX9.0c, FP16 HDR+AA capability, anisotropic filtering up to 16X with a high quality filtering mode as well as antialiasing up to 6X with an Adaptive AA mode. Adaptive AA allows alpha tested textures to benefit from antialiasing. Though for this very low priced card we do not expect that these features will be very usable for performance reasons, but maybe we will be surprised.
The Radeon X1600 PRO GPU features 12 pixel processors (ALUs) but only 4 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 4 raster operator units (ROPs). This means that theoretically the Radeon X1600 PRO should be fast at pure pixel shader operations, but may be slower in texture operations. For comparison the competition to this GPU, the GeForce 7600 GS at the same price point, has 12 pixel processors (ALUs) as well as 12 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 8 raster operators (ROPs). What this means is that on paper the GeForce 7600 GS is faster than the Radeon X1600 PRO for near the same amount of money...
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